Your Questions About Wind Turbine Syndrome
Donna asks…
Should environmentally sensitive people have fewer children, or more?
Environmentally sensitive people understand the pressure of burgeoning human population on scarce resources. Water shortages are already a reality that affect billions of people, and the need for more farmland and wood conspire to destroy habitats that are not merely exciting and unique, but that might hold answers to questions we are only beginning to ask.
It seems that environmentally sensitive people should take the lead and have smaller families–or no families at all. If ‘we’ do not start the process, who will?
But then again, such a strategy will reduce the most direct impact environmentally sensitive people can have on the next generation–their own children. Perhaps the most effective strategy for populating the world with more environmentally sensitive people would be for ‘us’ to have more children. Otherwise, the world might be overrun by ‘them.’
What’s a sensitive person to do?
Not a problem for America in the 1960s, Ardi, but the global problem was recognized 150 years earlier by Thomas Malthus.
JackP, Malthus also recognized your ‘solution:’ don’t worry, nature will solve the problem. My concern is that ‘natural solutions’ tend to be extraordinarily violent. Can’t we humans, who understand the problem and can anticipate the natural remedy, do better?
admin answers:
In the US, environmentalism came to the fore with the hippie generation. It was also the hippie generation who promoted Zero Population Grown, and we achieved it with tremendous success, if you can call “success”.
1. There are fewer people to buy American products and services, so our economy is not growing like that of China and India. Even with the “one child” law in China it is growing too fast to keep up and soon it may have to say “No children”.
2. With fewer young people than people who are growing old, the young cannot afford to pay for the entitlements given to them by their own grandparents generation, namely Social Security and Medicare.
A growing population was not a problem for America when the hippies (I was in that generation, but I was more conservative) promoted ZPG. They say right now the entire population of the world could fit into the borders of the US, or into even less space. But those same environmentalists are at odds with each other over how to solve problems. On the west coast where there is oil, they are saying no new oil rigs; in New England where there is wind, they don’t want wind turbines out in the ocean. Obama wants electric cars, but that will only drive up the demand for electricity and we are not building any new power plants. If we built pebble-bed nuclear reactors we wouldn’t have the China-syndrome problems and no spent fuel rods to dispose of, but those safe reactors are against American laws. Http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html
Helen asks…
Are Wind Turbines a Greater Health Hazard than Nuclear Power Plants?
Thousands of people living near wind farms are suffering from symptoms collectively know as “Wind Turbine Syndrome“.
http://earth2tech.com/2009/08/03/wind–turbine–syndrome-living-near-wind-farms-may-be-hazardous-to-your-health/
Also wind farms adversely effect property values, reducing many home owners equity by half.
Compare this to nuclear power where no health complaints have been filed, and property values are not effected.
Does this prove that wind farms pose a greater health hazard to people than nuclear power?
Would this be a good reason to develop more nuclear power and less wind power?
admin answers:
Sorry, Doctor, but I’m going have to be sceptical on this one . . .
The article you link to refers to The Independent, the newspaper for the ethically right-on “modern parents” type of middle-class worrier who loves nothing more than an environmental scare with their cornflakes in the morning.
It was The Independent who, the day after the Asian Tsunami struck published an article linking it with global warming. People on BOTH SIDES of the debate should not trust this paper.
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